Govt to ban staff using personal email

Government employees will no longer be able to use Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook or other email services for their official communication under a new initiative being taken to protect the privacy of government programmes and boost cybersecurity.
The government will soon make the use of the ‘dot bd’ domain mandatory for all emails sent by government employees, and will also switch to using its own servers.
Sources at the ICT Division said the policy will apply to the employees of all government, semi-government, autonomous and statutory organisations of Bangladesh.
At the ICT Division, employees including ICT Affairs Advisor Sajeeb Wazed Joy have already started using the domain for all official communication.
The new servers are located in Bangladesh and are managed by the Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC), a government organisation.
It has its own acceptable and disclosure e-mail usage policy and its own backup, retention and information security policy in compliance with the relevant laws of Bangladesh.
Abu Nasher, public relations officer of the ICT Division, told the Dhaka Tribune that the government employees should be provided with a secured government e-mail service to conduct their official communication effectively and efficiently.
“Due to the lack of uniform and standard guidelines and policies for the usage of government email within the government organisations, employees are using different services including private email service provider which poses a threat to their information security,” he said.
“In order to establish a uniform government e-mail system, a proper policy guidelines need to be formulated where the scope and the process of operation of email services should be clearly identified.”